John Willie answered, a little doubtfully, that he hoped to be present at the ceremony if he could get away from school. The Cardiff man wagged his head. There are few Welshmen who do not wag their heads at the sound of the word school.
"Ah, school; it iss a gra-and thing," he said, still wagging. "I not be work-king here with my shirt wet-t on my back if I go to a prop-per school."
"Oh, be dinged to that tale!" returned the Yorkshireman bluntly, cutting cheese on his leathery palm. "T' schools is all my backside! They learn 'em a lot o' newfangled stuff, but I remember 'at when tea wor eight shillin' a pund, an' they kept a penny nutmeg in a wood case as if it wor diamonds——"
"Aw-w-w, there iss that Burkie, talk-king again!" said the Cardiff man.
"It's reight, for all that——"
And presently the talk had veered round to those very changes of standards and conditions, his careful study of which had led Edward Garden to the conclusion that a generation had arisen that intended thenceforward to have more of the world's good things than it had been having or know the reason why.
As it happened, the work on the line had that day taken a new leap forward. Again all the life of the python had rolled on ahead, and John Willie, lunching with his friends, was doing so at a point actually beyond Llanyglo, two miles nearer to Abercelyn. From the Abercelyn end also the line was coming to meet them, and the two sections would meet at a place called Sarn. Sarn means Causeway, and there the sea showed, like a piece of bright piano-wire, across a waste of fleecy bog-cotton and bog-myrtle, sundew and flags and rushes. A siding was to be made there. Because of Sarn Church, a tiny little building with an odd Fifteenth-Century circular tower, Squire Wynne loved this region, and attended service there; but as that Service was held only once a year, the "Hough!" of the shunting-engines and the clanking of couplings would disturb it little. The Squire sighed to think that, among so many, many other changes, it would be only one change the more. His sales of land had provided him with just enough money to last his time out, and on the whole he thought he did not want to outlive his time. Perhaps he too had had his glimpse of that vision of Edward Garden's, though as it were in obverse; and, looking, he shrugged his shoulders. Who, in another twenty or thirty years, would care for the things he had cared for? Who would waste a thought on antiquity? Who would open his County History, or his books on Brasses or Church Plate, Memorials or Heraldry or Glass? Who would know each tree he came upon on his walks, as a country doctor knows his patients—its sickness, its health, its need of air, its treatment, its amputations? Who would repair the staircase at the Plas, and restore its magnificent ceilings, and set the merry smoke streaming up its chimneys once more?... Mr. Tudor Williams would probably do this last. He would no doubt convert the Plas into a Museum (as he would have converted Sarn Church itself into a Museum), and fill it with cases of ice-scratched pebbles, and diagrams of strata and flowers, for reluctant and educated urchins to gape at. The Squire was entirely in sympathy with John Willie Garden's corduroyed friend Burkie about these things. It seemed to him that the multitude, which after all had backbone enough to starve rather than go on the Parish, would not resist this organised pauperisation of its mind. It was time the Squire died, since he held that not everybody has the right to everything and no questions asked. Otherwise not an inhumane man, there were nevertheless abstractions which he loved more than he loved his fellow-being....
And who would drink what was left of that wondrous old port?
Well, the Squire, sighing and smiling a little wistfully both at once, intended to see to that himself.